And now, a random story about a landmark study on childhood trauma (lifted from Wikipedia) that fortunately doesn’t have any bearing on my life or the lives of anyone I know [sarcastic emoji].

In the 1980s, Vincent Felitti, head of Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, conducted interviews with people who had left Kaiser’s obesity program, and discovered that a majority of the 286 people he interviewed had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

Huh.

Felitti, with Robert Anda from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), went on to survey childhood trauma experiences of over 17,000 Kaiser Permanente patient volunteers. About half were female; 74.8% were white; 75.2% had attended college; all had jobs and good health care.

Physical abuse

Sexual abuse

Emotional abuse

Physical or emotional neglect

Exposure to domestic violence

Household substance abuse

Household mental illness

Parental separation or divorce

Incarcerated household member

As researchers followed participants over time, they discovered that a person's exposure to the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) above had a strong, graded relationship to numerous health, social, and behavioral problems, including smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, and severe obesity, and were correlated with illnesses including depression, heart disease, cancer and chronic lung disease.

Compared to an ACE score of zero (none of the experiences listed), having four different types of adverse childhood experiences was associated with a 700% increase in alcoholism, twice as much risk of being diagnosed with cancer, and a four-fold increase in emphysema. An ACE score above six was associated with a 30-fold (3000%) increase in attempted suicide.

What is encouraging about this study—and the decades of research that have followed it—is that it gives all of us words and reasons for why we do some of the things we do, tools to turn those problems around, and grace for other people who live complicated lives.

I’ve been thinking about loneliness, especially the loneliness one can feel in a crowd. I’ve always loved feeling anonymous in a crowd—it’s one of the reasons I could survive New York City—but feeling lonely is a bit different.

These days I feel lonely as a person who believes in compassion, in hospitality, in human rights. I feel lonely for thinking that “Black lives matter” is a complete no-brainer, precisely because all lives matter. I feel lonely for assuming more Muslims are mothers or accountants or weekend gardeners than terrorists.

I feel lonely, but I am definitely not alone. I am lost in a crowd. Millions and millions of people and most of my friends share these views. Hell—millions of people are Muslim mothers, are Black, are immigrants, etc.

How is it that a few obnoxious voices—or even thousands—can disorient me so much that I feel as if I’m an isolated minority?

When you try not to let your editorial impulses get in the way of your creative ones, you generally give yourself permission to photograph whatever attracts you, and after a couple decades you may begin to notice some unusual themes in your subject matter...

One of the treats of living in a diverse, developing neighborhood is setting foot in new and old businesses. From hand-crafted guitars to bougie ice cream to a comic book shop lauded by The New York Times, Kensington is always surprising. This year Forbes magazine proclaimed southern Kensington (Fishtown) as America's hottest new neighborhood. Here are a few of the unsung and farther-flung businesses they didn't mention.

My corner of Philadelphia (Kensington) is seeing rapid real estate development. While nearly everyone wants the benefits of development (jobs, for instance, or improved city services) those changes often come with a price—increased taxes, higher rents, higher cost of living. For some, development means displacement.

The Reinvestment Fund measures displacement risk by comparing average housing sales prices to median family income. On a map generated with that index in PolicyMap, a wide swath of my neighborhood appears purple, spreading north and east from Center City along the Delaware River, indicating a high likelihood that my neighbors or I will be priced out.

The company I work for, New Kensington Community Development Corporation, is one of many organizations countering involuntary displacement by helping families purchase homes, repairing existing homes, and building new affordable housing. On my six-block walk to work, I document the physical changes.

According to research by writer Lawrence Papoff, Bell installed the first public telephone outside its offices in Lancefield’s Stationery Store in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1881. Pay phone use peaked in Canada in 1998, when there were 90,000 phones from coast to coast. Bell remains the largest provider with some 45,000 phones, mostly in Ontario and Quebec.

In 2013, Bell Canada and Bell Aliant told the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that, of the 55,000 pay phones then in use, 10,501 phones were making revenue of less than 50 cents a day. Still, the regulatory agency found that the phones are critical for low-income or homeless people who don’t have cellphones or landlines of their own. They are also critical in rural areas and aboriginal communities with spotty or zero coverage, and are often used in emergencies.

I am not the only photographer who finds these relics of a pre-mobile era interesting. Joshua Nelson has a large collection here.

One of the reasons my family bought our house in Kensington was the large commercial/residential space on the first floor. Longtime neighborhood residents remember it as Irene's—a corner store with apartments above. More recent arrivals remember it as a dump, with billboards on the side and roof leaking into the basement.

We imagine it as kind of a flex space that could accommodate a community meeting, art show or yoga class one day, and a couple of weary travelers the next. But getting there is proving to be an adventure.

This 60-second video was part of my application to the Obama Foundation. The doors and newspaper shown below were found buried inside the walls. I'm not an architect, so I'm drafting our constantly-evolving plans in Photoshop and InDesign.

Habitat for Humanity’s vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. Families qualify for their homeownership and home repair programs by showing a need for safe, affordable housing, by meeting income criteria, and by being willing to contribute “sweat equity” by working on Habitat projects.

I attended a joyful home dedication ceremony in North Philadelphia in 2017, and met some of the kindest and most photogenic new homeowners in the world!

Point of Pines Cabin dominates the lowest floor of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. It came from Edisto Island, South Carolina, a coastal island an hour south of Charleston. Edisto supports both a majority White beach town and a majority Gullah residential population, whose ancestors were taken as slaves from Senegal, Gambia, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

I was introduced to Edisto Island two decades ago by Nick Lindsay, my animated poetry prof who made his living building boats and homes on the island. And I’m Glad—an oral history of two farmers that he transcribed—is one of the island’s stand-out histories.

Last summer my wife brought me back to Edisto. She and her family had vacationed there for years before I met them. As an author with German, Jamaican and Chinese roots, Chelle felt drawn to both the island’s simple familiarity and its complicated past. We camped outside of Botany Bay Plantation, a wildlife preserve maintained on land once covered in cotton, worked by slaves.

Working and living in a neighborhood wrestling with drug addition, rapid development and displacement, I find daily walks with dog and camera to be a good way to wind down and remind myself of what's ordinary.

You've probably eaten food from a food truck. Now imagine cooking at one.

Vetri Community Partnership runs a Mobile Teaching Kitchen that delivers pop-up cooking classes and demonstrations at schools, community events and farmers markets across Philadelphia. They invite children and families to participate in 15-minute hands-on cooking demonstrations where they learn basic skills they can use to make healthy dishes at home.

Somerset Neighbors for Better Living (SNBL) is the neighborhood organization for about 90 blocks of Kensington, Philadelphia, centered on Somerset Avenue. Along with advocating for neighborhood safety and making residents’ voices heard in zoning decisions, SNBL organizes community gatherings. Their vision for the annual Multicultural Festival is a big party celebrating one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in Philadelphia.

Community Development Corporations, or CDCs, are nonprofit organizations that connect government dollars to important work in local communities. Tess came to Philadelphia to pursue medical school, but was drawn to community development after seeing the power of residents’ place-based work in West Philadelphia.

Now Tess is Associate Director of Community Engagement at New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC), where she oversees its Community Connectors program, supports the work of a local civic association—Somerset Neighbors for Better Living (SNBL)—and leads the organization’s trauma-informed approach to community development.

Donie serves the Kensington community with sincerity, love and drive. ”It is my job to work with residents, empower them to realize their own vision as a community, and help them make it a reality,“ she says.

”I am a firm believer that this community in Kensington has given so much more to me than I could ever give to it in my lifetime. Without our community members’ support, and the leap of faith they have taken to welcome me into their homes and challenge me each day, none of my work would be possible.“

Catherine Friesen, New York, December 2009. We turned her Spanish Harlem apartment into a makeshift studio for headshots for her grad school application. She styled her own hair.

Four years ago, after a dear friend died of cancer, I combed through letters she had written to me two decades earlier, when we were in college and sometimes dating and both of us were trying to figure out how to become adults. I chose about 20 letters—some typed, some illustrated on colored paper, some with beads or feathers—that I thought captured her young personality without being uncomfortably personal.

Catherine was an actor. She died less than a year after completing her MFA from the University of South Carolina. She was also a New Yorker, having left her native Indiana in 1998 to become a building superintendent, school administrator, baker and a good many other things in NYC. Most of all, she was a gentle soul. She noticed small things—the curl of a leaf, the expression on a squirrel—and seemed to speak for all creatures as they would want to be represented.

Catherine didn't want to be treated differently because she was dying, and so she told few people she had cancer. Most of her USC classmates didn't know. She also guarded her legacy, destroying garbage bags of personal detritus in the last weeks of her life. And her desire to live was almost delusional—she insisted up until days before her death that the end was not yet near. Many of her friends didn't get a chance to see her before was gone.

I wanted to send a package of letters to her best friend (fittingly living in St. Catharines, Ontario). But before I stuck it in the mail, I thought I should scan everything, just in case.

It turned out to be unnecessary. The letters arrived in St. Catharines, were hungrily read, and came back. The box sat on my desk, unopened, for weeks.

Then a strange thing happened: they disappeared. They left on the same night my old wedding ring slipped its chain on my bureau. My housemate had a drug relapse and robbed his own home, taking a stereo, jewelry, laptop, bicycle—and apparently, for some reason, Catherine's letters.

It took a couple weeks for police to arrest the culprit (eventually they got video footage of his using my credit card at an ATM and in a taxi) and in that time I initiated a couple awkward conversations with him about the value of what I had lost, without ever indicating I knew who might have taken it. He never tipped his hand.

Insurance covered the wedding band and Discover refunded the credit card charges, but the letters never resurfaced. Eventually, I decided that Catherine herself might have inspired the theft to stamp out one last record of her adolescence.

She apparently didn't know about the digital files.

Catherine Friesen, Milwaukee, December 2013. This is the last photo I took of her, on the site of her last role, Hamlet.

Morgan Library, New York, December 2015. Exactly two years later, I was startled to find this alternate ending to A Farewell to Arms enlarged on the wall of a Hemingway exhibit.

Funky or tart, balanced or sharp, sours are the first beers I have really liked. I intentionally missed the IPA craze, which unfortunately seems to have taken over most of the U.S. beer world. I can only hope that the same thing happens for sours, because I am 100% on that wagon. Although perhaps part of the allure is that they can be hard to find. To drink at Transmitter, a brewery in Long Island City, Queens, we wandered through a parking lot, below a highway and across the tracks to a warehouse under the Pulaski Bridge.

In August 2017, artist Michael Morgan showed adults and children how to shape and glaze blocks of wet clay at a workshop in Kensington, Philadelphia. Weeks later, he fired the blocks into bricks and used them to build a piece of public art at the "Frankford Gateway," near the intersection of Frankford Avenue and Sterner Street.

Morgan's sculpture is part of a series of projects to turn neglected lots into a source of community pride. The project was made possible by New Kensington Community Development Corporation, Mural Arts and Philadelphia LISC.

Thanks to footage from Bea J.E. Rider and the ongoing miracle of iMovie, I was able to edit and voice this video at my kitchen table one evening after work.

It was a weird winter, but weird seems to be typical these days. Mind-numbing cold at the beginning of January, then balmy spring showers in February. Here and there, a few bits of "normal" winter. These images from a sudden snow squall in Germantown, Philadelphia.